I waited for hours in the medical hallway with Baskin standing right next to me. He walked away as soon as I was summoned into the office, now staffed by nursing students trying to prove to themselves that they would treat all patients the same once they snagged their RN’s.

“They called and said you got hit by your roommate. Are you okay?” she lamented, over-concerned.

“Oh, no, it was just a mush. That’s what they call it, right?”

The student in a lab coat examined my forehead more closely than the doctor did when when I got the spider bite or when the C/O shot the laser pointer in my eye. Took my temperature.

“Um, do you know if I’m moving or not, because it’s after count time…” I asked leaning in closer to one of the students and she didn’t look at me. Instead, she locked eyes with Shiny Hair in silence, which was as clear a signal that I was fucked.

The door pushed open – a huge HIPAA [Health Information Portability and Accountability Act] no-no since it’s an examining room and any patient could have been undressed or receiving treatment – but rights will not stand in the way when you can bust Bozelko.

The door’s pusher, Lt. Booz, had returned to the scene and stood outside, flanked by C/O Brokowski – who doesn’t need rumors because all of the inmates watch him jump from jellies to every goddamned jam possible – and C/O’s Lambert and McMurray, who I heard is dating the operating captain. I don’t know if it’s true but I believe it.

Three C/O’s, along with one lieutenant, is the magical combination to disappear someone in solitary confinement.

“Lieutenant Booz, may I ask a question?”

Booz made sarcastic movements and expressions, like he would listen to me politely and intently, when everyone knew he wouldn’t.

“Can you tell me why I’m going and when I’ll be out?”

“You’re going because we need to investigate you. And, when you’ll get out? I have no idea. Turn around.”

McMurray cuffed me and the posse walked me down the hallway of the inpatient medical building out the door and to the right, to solitary confinement.

After McMurry strip-searched me and watched me don the red scrubs, she left, locked the door and slid the notice to me that they were holding me in administrative detention, in case the cuffing, strip search and being dropped into a basement room hadn’t tipped me off. “Pending Investigation.”

I didn’t even spread the pistachio-colored sheet out. I just hoisted myself on the black metal frame and landed on mattress with a crunch, the hunter green weave of fibers sounding every time I moved. At first, I was still, supine, as tears rolled out of my eyes sideways like the string on a mask.

The saline burn scolded me: you shouldn’t have said anything! But the alternative was to have Keisha needle me forever, deny me sleep and cause as much chaos as possible. If I hadn’t said anything, I would’ve still ended up on this human wrapper in this dungeon anyway, because they would have blamed both of us for Keisha’s quite remarkable ability to escalate any dispute infinitely. That is, if she didn’t beat the brakes off me.

I realized then that I never had a choice; that nothing would have kept me from the Restricted Housing Unit. It was impossible if I were assigned to live with Keisha; she would either kill/harm me, or drive me to misbehaving, or I’d hoist my own petard by asking for distance from her. I was never going to win. Assigning Keisha to me as a roommate was a set-up from minute one.

I turned and rested my cheek against the vinyl – sheet still by my feet where it couldn’t even pretend to protect me from the years of use on this mattress that I know was never washed once – and I could hear the tiny tap of each tear against it. Eventually my tears’ trickle tickled my nostril as a puddle collected. My nose ran, too, into a mass of moisture that I fell asleep on.

“Bozelko, get up, we’re coming down to get ya,” came a tinny announcement through the intercom.

“What time is it?” I asked and craned my neck toward the window. Still dark, but no thud-thud-thuddd of the trap doors for breakfast trays.

“Two-fifteen.”

“I don’t have court,” I said to no one. Wake up time for court is at 3:30, not 2:15, in the morning, but mistakes thrive at York CI.

“Not court, investigation, at the LT’s office,” tinny voice told me.

“I have to go now?”

“Fuck! Yes. Why else would I wake you up?” he shrieked.

And, with that, another C/O appeared at the door and told me to kneel on the chair outside my cell. With my feet behind me, dangling off the edge, he shackled me and took me toward the the door.

As approached it, noticed it was a deeper dark outside than I remembered of night, like a navy rug. Runoff from a drainpipe was matte white, frozen so completely that I could see the icicle’s dryness, no heat in the air whatsoever to give it rinse with moisture.

I shuffled, shackled, though the still of cold so severe that it made me catch my breath. It was the only thing I could have caught, being cuffed the way I was. No one had delivered any underwear or bra to me when I was brought into the building and the red scrub set included pants that sagged on me, down low enough that a brisk pace could pull them right to the sidewalk and expose my unshaven legs and ass to blistering cold and burning humiliation – as well as a charge of indecent exposure. I wouldn’t have even been able to pull my red chinos back up quickly because that asshole held my arm to “balance” me. I’d been, in essence, hogtied and asked to walk that way through a freezing gauntlet, barely covered in cheap cotton.

So I walked even more slowly to prevent my pants from dropping, only extending the time I would spend in winter’s tightening clutch. What should have been a two-minute walk to the administration building became five, with the guy holding my arm in a jacket, gloves, hat and neckwarmer. The mist of human life coming out of his mouth while my teeth chattered uncontrollably. When I saw my reflection in the glass near the door of the lieutenant’s office, the soft ducts where my tears had depleted themselves puffed under my eyes. I was way beyond pitiful; I was ghoulish and twitching when he led me to Lt. Booz, bald and paunchy, sitting at a desk, ready to do his investigation into the matter, racking up overtime.

“It’s two in the morning,” I hiccuped out.

“I say when we do this investigation.”

“Oh-kay.” I was still shivering.

“So, your roommate, she spoke to us. She said you and her have some plans when you get out.”

Booz then went on to explain, in his wanna-be-cop delivery, that Keisha had told him – even wrote in a statement – that she and I were planning to meet up on the outside when we were released and she would, from her prostitution perch, induce C/O X to pay her for services and drive her to her usual spot, where she and I would proceed to kill him.

Booz et al. thought this was a real plot; they were sure Keisha had been talking about this – she’s tried to make the same plan every time she’s been here – but I hadn’t reported it, which convinced them that it was a real plot. I was in on it and a threat to Mr. X.

“Well, Keisha said that but I thought it was about as likely as her becoming secretary of state, so, no, I didn’t report it.”

“You got jokes, Bozelko? Think it’s funny that an officer’s life would be endangered.”

“No, sir. One-hundred percent serious. That’s what I actually thought. I mean, for that to be a real risk, C/O X would have to be in the habit of picking up prostitutes. I think we both know that isn’t true, despite what’s reported on inmate.com. And by Keisha herself.”

Booz’s face dropped like I just announced it was Law Day.

“We’re done here,” he announced.

“We are,” I agreed. And I knew I wasn’t getting out of the restricted housing unit for a while.

“Here, take these statement papers and write out what you just told me in the no-contact visit room, you know, since you’re such a good writer.”

Jefferson County Common Pleas Court Judge Joseph J. Bruzzese Jr., who has carried a gun for years fearing “nutcases out there who want retaliation,” was ambushed and wounded last week as he was entering his courthouse in Steubenville, Ohio. The judge and a court probation officer fired back, killing the assailant, who happens to be the father of a young man convicted of rape in the same courthouse four years ago. Shooting a judge – or anyone for that matter – is unreasonable, unlawful and morally wrong, of course, but I would be remiss in not allowing this story to opportune a dragging of some members of the bench.

A study from Harvard Law School published last year found that judges follow the law far less often than we expect, particularly in criminal cases. Even when the law is followed, a disturbed litigant/defendant can act, well, disturbed, but those “nutcases” who want retaliation might have been screwed by a judge – and had no further remedy. A way to prevent another situation like this: everyone – including jurists – follow the law, in every case, in every way, because we’re all equal under the law, remember? LESSON: DON’T TRUST JUDGES (but don’t shoot them, either).

When it comes to sting operations, what counts as entrapment is about to get debated again. The Santa Fe Reporter and New Mexico In Depth looked at one case out of Albuquerque where an undercover ATF operative seemed to go too far. Jennifer Padilla thought she’d found a new boyfriend who cared about her kids and her effort to stay clean after several stints in jail and a long battle with drug addiction. As it turns out, Padilla was targeted by the informant, who encouraged her to relapse. After two months of dating, he asked her to help arrange two meth deals. Now Padilla’s back behind bars and the informant (who has a much more serious criminal record than Padilla) is still working for the feds…and probably dating someone else with a criminal record, low self-esteem and a future clear of lawbreaking…if she can get away from him now. LESSON: ON SECOND THOUGHT, TRUST NO ONE.

White nationalist and convicted felon Christopher Cantwell turned himself in to Charlottesville police last week on a warrant for one count of malicious bodily injury by means of a caustic substance and two felony counts of illegal use of tear gas, but surprisingly not for possessing a firearm, which is illegal in Virginia for people with criminal records – and clearly depicted in the Vice News special on the Charlottesville march that featured him.

But the real story here is that Cantwell was denied bail, a condition usually reserved for defendants charged with murder, people like his fellow white nationalist James Alex Fields, the driver of the Dodge Charger that killed counterprotester Heather Heyer on August 12, 2017. It’s true that Cantwell doesn’t live in Virginia, but fleeing and failing to appear later would have been hard for this dude after his cameo in the Vice News special and his subsequent celluloid hysteria about actually having to take a collar. While none of the media coverage of Cantwell’s arrest say this explicitly, a judge made a legal finding that Cantwell is dangerous and it’s not clear if the court knows about the guns or the threats from the Vice special. It’s entirely possible that the court found Cantwell to be dangerous for his beliefs, which is a very dangerous place for American courts to find themselves – and very uncommon as courts are usually glad to post a bond to get an accused person to inject some cash into a local economy.

I wonder if other white nationalists have been/will be treated the same way when they appear in criminal cases, as many of them have and will likely continue to do. While we’re on the topic, Cantwell’s video is a prime lesson in how to be a punk bitch when you find out there’s a warrant for your arrest. For Christ’s sake, there are bougie white chicks who’ve never cried before, during or after being arrested. You’re reading one right now. LESSON: TRUST ME, CANTWELL’S A SNOWFLAKE.

One advantage – there are a scant few of them – that I have over other inmates is speed. I entered the room and within 3 steps I was halfway up the ladder to my bunk, raised above the one-woman fracas.

“I am a bad bitch! I am – baaad motherfuckin bitch!” Keisha sang along with Janet Jackson’s If I Was Your Girl which was blasting lyrics other than those… like “the things I’d do to you”…. into her ears because the song doesn’t include those words.

The shift had changed since I was sitting in the common area. Now it was Suarez, bald with no internal rap because he’s new. A clean inmate.com record made him suspicious to me – no one in prison squeaks like that. When the nurses came in for medline and they opened all the doors, I alighted from the bunk and scurried to the C/O’s desk.

“Mr. Suarez, I don’t know if you heard what’s going on here…”

“I did,” he said as he shrugged. He didn’t give a fuck.

“And there’s nothing you can do?”

“I gotta witness what she’s doing,” he said from a desk that’s mere feet away from her screaming. “I can’t just send her to seg.”

“I’m not asking for that,” I explained, but I guess his response was justifiable since so many women here don’t seek to avoid trouble as much as they want to cause it for someone else and watch them suffer. Seg isn’t about security; it’s about schadenfreude. But not for me, so I was blunt:

“I just don’t want to live with her anymore. Move me – anywhere.”

“If she starts her shit again, hit the buzzer and I’ll come over,” he offered.

“Yeah, except I’m staying up on my bunk and the button is down by the door. You want me to come down near her to press it? Besides she’ll just stop doing what’s she’s doing and you won’t have the evidence you say you need.”

“So, then, if she starts again when you go back in, walk back and forth in front of the window and I’ll see you and beep in so I can hear what she’s doing, ‘kay? Catch her in the act.”

As she prayed, I paced, back and forth, over a four-foot span, passing the five-inch window like some asshole duck in a shooting gallery. If I appeared in that window once, I appeared maybe 300 times. Step, step. Pivot. Step, step. Pivot…for about 20 minutes as she tore through various prayers. And Suarez never looked up. Not once. I swear, I swear he was smiling.

Then, when divinity seemed insufficient, Keisha went to the sink, opened my toothpaste, stretched her arm out, rotated her wrist 180 degrees and squeezed a long, taffy-like drop to the floor.

Step. “Keisha, don’t!” I warned her from my gallery. Step. Pivot. “I can’t order another for 5 days and I won’t get it for another seven. And I have teeth. So cut the shit.”

And at the next Pivot, a woman easily twice my size was coming at me.

I’m dead. Real dead.

But all she did was press her palm against my upper cheek and push it slightly, with a twist. Her size made me think that Keisha could pack a wallop, but she can’t even pack a toothbrush. If all fights are like that, I can take all comers.

But I won’t.

“That’s it!” I screamed and swung my hand in that horizontal chop that always tells people that whatever’s happening is about to end real quick. The doors opened for rec[reation] and I barged out of the room.

“Suarez, she just put her hand on my face. Move me, please, alright? I want to be moved. There’s no reason for me to have to endure this when I have to go to work in the morning.”

“Can’t move you without calling an L.T.,” he said, like this was some insurmountable barrier.

“Suarez, alls I did was mush the bitch in the face,” Keisha added from behind me. According to inmate.com, mushing is an official fighting move. You put your hand on someone’s face and push in a rotating manner. I never knew this.

“Fine, call,” I huffed. “I mean, may I impose upon you to call a lieutenant?” is how I corrected my tune and lyrics. Suarez picked up the receiver.

Within minutes, Lieutenant Potash swashbuckled through the door, wry smile between his hunched shoulders and his I-just-fell-off-the-set-of-Anchorman mustache. Like he had won. Like this was expected. Violence could have been predicted earlier and, in fact, was. But doesn’t that make me the winner? That I was right all along?

“So, what happened?” Potash asked as squared his hips in a power stance.

“The same thing that’s been happening all day. I don’t care if she goes to seg. If I can just move, so I can sleep, that’s all I’m asking for.”

“Well, that’s not fuckin’ happening,” he decided.

“So I’m required to go back in the cell with her?”

“Nope. You reported violence so you’re gonna be seen by medical. Baskin here will take you over,” and he jerked a thumb at the guard who used to call another cellmate out of the room every time he worked third shift. She would disappear upstairs for an hour for no reason whatsoever. That’s no rumor.

“I’m not hurt. It was nothing. She didn’t hit me. It was just a mush. That’s what they call it, right? A mush?”

Potash just stared at me.

“Alright….Wait, why do I need to be escorted?” I asked, because I was never in on the game. Or its goal.

This is huge: a judge ordered the death penalty off the table for a defendant in a mass murder case because prosecutors and sheriffs had engaged in misconduct. Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals said for him to ignore the misconduct – which included shredded documents, jailhouse informants used illegally to get confessions, deputies who lied on the witness stand, deputies who pleaded the Fifth in court so they wouldn’t be charged with perjury – in the case against Scott Dekraai who shot 8 people, including his ex-wife, in a hair salon in 2011 would be “unconscionable, even cowardly.” In prosecuting this defendant, the state ended up saving him because their actions were so dishonest. This development does raise another question of how far a prosecuting team has to go into misconduct for an entire case to be thrown out.

All Florida prisons were locked down last week, indefinitely, because the Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March that was planned for – and occurred on – Saturday, 900 miles away in Washington, DC, would cause unrest among the 97,000 inmates within the facilities; the Department of Corrections said it had credible threats to security within. The March received not one mention in mainstream media, so it likely didn’t deliver the millions it advertised. This reveals a lot about the nature of prison lockdowns. The Department of Correction kept almost 100,000 people locked inside small cells for days because a non-event was happening a large distance away. Supposedly, the lockdown/shakedown netted some weapons and cell phones but that’s standard for Florida prisons. Totally unfair and counterproductive, this was not a safety measure but a show of non-physical force.

“I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio,” President Trump told Fox News, talking about the controversial Arizona sheriff recently convicted of ignoring a federal judge’s orders to stop racial profiling. Arpaio was one of the biggest supporters of Trump’s plans to crack down on immigration. The ACLU says a pardon would be “an official presidential endorsement of racism.” As far as I’m concerned, because Arpaio was notorious for humiliating inmates, he’s made himself ineligible for any mercy, especially since the maximum sentence he’s facing is six months, in a federal facility that never suffered his management. He’ll be fine no matter what.

One thing that overcrowds every prison is unsubstantiated rumor. It can be about someone, anyone in here. They call this virtual – and sometimes downright ignorant – grapevine “inmate.com,” I guess because we can make the dumbest stuff go viral pretty quickly, even though no one ever clicks a mouse – or knows what they’re talking about. For accurate facts, this wire is for the birds.

Whenever tittle-tattle reaches my eardrums, much of it sounds outlandish, if not for its content, then its accessibility. How would inmates ever know this stuff about other people from the outside? I mean, I’m the only one in here who does research and it’s not about this nonsense. I can’t fathom how these facts smuggle themselves inside this place.

Despite my disdain for it, inmate.com has created for me a new motto, words I doubted I would ever utter, especially since my standards on evidence became more stringent after my trial: I have no idea if that’s true, but I believe it. I am becoming an uncritical thinker, which would make me a match for Keisha, my cellmate.

We were assigned to the handicapped room that is isolated from the tiers and close to the staff desk. The handicapped room was apropos for Keisha. She screams and shakes people down for junk food and then break into a dance routine. She cries herself into hysterical laughter. Freud wouldn’t have a field day with her; he’d shit in his diaper and cry for his mother, two things I myself was on the verge of doing with her.

When Keisha moved in, I knew she was here for stabbing another woman in the chest and puncturing her lung (she lived) but scuttlebutt was that she was a prostitute on the streets who’d murdered a number of johns to get the remainder of their money, a la Eileen Wournos. I will say just this: I believe it.

In her past sentences, because Keisha’s had many, she’d pummeled guards, spit at them. She wants to brawl with all. It’s almost like it’s her default mode. If she says: “I will kill a bitch” once, then she says it ten times a day.

Naturally, she believes everything she heard on inmate.com.

When her anger officially turned on me, it was because I had refused her an extra egg in the breakfast line. They aren’t mine to give away. So she did the only reasonable thing and threatened to kill me to the girl assigned to distribute the juice cups who reported it, which I never thought was a bad idea. One of the good guys, C/O Roman, wanted to lock Keisha up but a ludicrous lieutenant, Booz, refused to sign off on it.

The buzz on Booz was that he was losing his house because he was underwater on a subprime mortgage, some peculiar dirt because these guys certainly earn enough. But, given how much of a dick Booz is, I believe it.

Yet another supervisor, Lieutenant Smith, stood by as Booz was listening to what happened.

“Why don’t the two of you just bang out back in the room?” Smith asked me, his overly intricate facial hair shape-up reminding me that I am not at home here. No man I have ever met would try to turn his facial hair into art.

“I don’t bang,” I said flatly.

Smith is new so there’s no intel on him but I don’t need any.

Then, throughout the rest of the day, as Keisha intermittently threatened me and threw her plastic bowls at me in a cell merely feet away from the C/O’s desk where they could hear everything and see something, one guard would peer in our 5-inch window and ask her, after losing every trace of the tough-guy schtick he uses with behaved inmates:

“Please calm down.”

She didn’t.

So they pulled me out of the cell, told me to sit at one of the four-man tables in the housing unit’s lobby.

CTO Walters [Correction Treatment Officer] came in, one half of his backpack slung over his shoulder as he departed for the day.

He’s supposedly a bodybuilder who’s show name is “Chocolate Thunder” but he seems more to me like an apple with legs. The unsubstantiated rumor about him is that he moonlights by posing, either nude or close to it, for women’s calendars.

“Umm, excuse me, Inmate Bozelko. Why are you out of your cell?” he sing-songed at me.

“The C/O’s told me to sit here because, well, my roommate is kind of wilding in there,” I answered him and pointed to the handicapped room.

“Who’s your roommate?”

“Keisha D.”

“Oh boy. Oh Lord. All of this drama is making my uterus hurt. Please!” he yelled at me. And to the guard at the desk:

“Listen, DO NOT let her back in there because, if anything happens, if she (pointed to cell) does anything to her (points to me), we are liable.”

He then put on his shades and fled fast, uterus, backpack and all. I will never be able to prove it, but I swear, I swear he was smiling as he left.

Lieutenant Potash must have passed Walters on the walkway because he came in so soon after the walking uterus left. Potash is all thunder and no chocolate. Unsubstantiated stuff about him is that he had undergone severe discipline for allegedly using his DOC badge to make obscene citizens’ arrests of regular citizens, one he normally couldn’t get his hands on. Supposedly he was acting like a legit cop, pulling over women who were driving but subjecting them to bizarre questions and searches. I don’t know if it’s true, but I totally believe it. If you saw his hunchbacked anger, 80’s-style glasses frames and acidic attitude, you’d believe it, too.

Whenever I think of this story about Potash, I laugh hysterically and think: These DOC dudes kill me with their craziness.

“Bozelko, what’re you doing out of your cell?” Potash boomed at me.

“The C/O’s told me to sit out here because my roommate is out of control.”

“Yeah, well, it’s about to be count time so get the fuck back in there or go to seg,” Potash yelled, like I had asked to hang out with the staff or wasn’t following their orders.

Now I thought: These DOC dudes are going to kill me with their craziness as I pulled the curved metal plate that served as my cell door handle and walked back inside where Keisha was dancing in her underwear to music piped into her ears from my radio and headphones.

Taylor Lorenz, tech reporter for The Hill, reported that Charlottesville police officers suspected that James Alex Fields, Jr. wasn’t malicious in his intent when he plowed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of protestors in at the “Unite the Right” rally on Saturday. The cops who talked to Lorenz claimed Fields was scared because people were acting violent around his car and he panicked. Their chief, Al Thomas, said at a press conference that Fields’ actions were “premeditated.” I don’t know how you view that but, from my experience, police don’t usually sympathize with a murder suspect or explain his actions in a quasi-exculpatory way to a reporter, especially when the viral video of the crime shows he floored it into people who were actually a good distance away from his car. My guess is that there are some Alt-Right cops down in Charlottesville.

Before President Donald Trump failed to condemn the attacks adequately and instead tried to say that “all sides” were responsible for a terrorist’s ramming his car into a crowd of people, the Cato Institute reminded us that you don’t need to have committed a crime to be impeached. Read their explanation here.

The difference between jurisdictions on what constitutes a larceny is startling, so startling that I’m sure that shoplifters target certain places that define the crime in the most generous way. For instance, for a larceny to become a felony in Connecticut, the value of the item(s) stolen has to be more than $1000. The same misdemeanor/felony threshold in Florida is $300. If you were going to steal, where would you do it? Don’t think people are above long-distance travel to commit crimes we usually dismiss as minor and simply short-sighted. One of my cellmates drove from Connecticut to Pennsylvania because she thought the penalties for larceny were less severe there and she had heard she could find more malls to hit than she could at home. In case you’re wondering, she got caught down in the Keystone State but didn’t get sentenced to term of imprisonment like she did up here.

Above photo is from the traveling “Inside the Box” exhibit which featured a 10-foot-by-12-foot replica solitary confinement cell. This cell is based on one from Wisconsin but it could easily be one I stayed in. In Connecticut, no pencils are allowed anymore in segregation, so for the 75 days (aggregate) I spent in there, I wrote nothing except when I was supervised to write legal mail with a pencil I had to give back. It’s part of the punishment to be beckoned by that blankness and not be able to do anything about it.

THREE IDEAS IN CRIME AND JUSTICE FROM JULY 31 – AUGUST 6, 2017

Yeah, the Trump-Russia grand jury was formally announced, Martin “PharmaBro” Shkreli was convicted on three of eight counts against him and Michelle Carter, the teenager who texted her boyfriend encouragement for his suicide, was sentenced to 15 months’ incarceration.

But that’s just old news, continued. More important stories emerged last week, I think.

The Chris Christie-led panel issued an interim set of proposals Monday designed to fight the nation’s opioid crisis. Members unanimously urged the president to eliminate barriers to Medicaid coverage (which would mean keep the Affordable Care Act, not repeal it), make more naloxone available to more drug users, and to provide more training for doctors. The panel also wants to expand “Good Samaritan” laws protecting those who report overdoses. The recommendations are everything the Trump Administration isn’t about.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions gets most of his policy ideas for the Department of Justice – policies like returning to mandatory minimum sentencing, resurrecting civil asset forfeiture – from the Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety. The problem is that one knows exactly who’s on it.

More than half of the mayoral candidates in Detroit are ex-offenders. The mayoral primary, which will be held Tuesday, August 8th, will determine the two final candidates, regardless of party affiliation. It’s unlikely, but theoretically possible, that Detroit would have to choose between two candidates, each convicted of felonies, to lead the city.

Every blog post was written while Chandra Bozelko was incarcerated at York Correctional Institution. Prison Diaries was the first regularly-bylined column by an incarcerated person to appear in a non-prison newspaper.